Once upon a time

From Madonna to Kylie, from Ricky Gervais to Paul McCartney, A-list actors, comics and singers are reinventing themselves as children's authors. Most make a terrible job of it - so why do the books keep coming and the tills keep ringing? Ed Pilkington investigates

'If you haven't heard of the English Roses by now," writes Madonna at the start of her new children's book, "then you are either: a) living under a rock, b) living on the moon, c) away with the fairies. If you fit the description of a, b, or c, then I am happy to clue you in to what the rest of the world already knows."

Madonna has come in for a lot of stick recently over the adoption saga, much of it no doubt undeserved. Yet no matter how much sympathy she generates, it has to be said that this passage about her own writing surely ranks among the most self-serving, self-satisfied and downright smug introductions to any book in recent memory.

The depressing thing is, she is almost certainly right. With more than a million of Madonna's five children's books sold since 2003, and the latest instalment, The English Roses: Too Good to Be True, flying off the shelves on both sides of the Atlantic, you probably do have to be in a coma to be unaware of Madonna's girl band Nicole, Amy, Charlotte, Grace and Binah.

And that's not all. Madonna's success has lured a host of other celebrities and publishers into the market. So lucrative has the celebrity children's book business become that the children's sections of book shops are awash with actors, pop singers and politicians, even an alleged mobster, all trying to grab their market share.

The phenomenon is most outlandishly evident in American bookshops. Over the past two months, the top five slots in the New York Times bestseller list for children's picture books have featured no fewer than three works by people famous in other fields: Is There Really a Human Race? by the film star Jamie Lee Curtis; Noelle's Treasure Tale by the singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan; and the Big Book of Manners by the comedian and actor Whoopi Golderg.

In the UK, the present top five has less of a celebrity tinge (the final Lemony Snicket is number one), but the trend is the same. Currently selling briskly in both the UK and America are kids' books by Paul McCartney, Julie Andrews, Kylie Minogue and the aforesaid Madonna. Add them all up and this starts to look not so much as a phenomenon as a stampede.

"I don't hang out at celebrity haunts that much," says Julie Just, the children's book editor of the New York Times. "But if I did, I would love to ask these famous people what they think they are doing."

Let's hazard a guess as to what they would answer. "I've just squandered my last million dollars and need the cash"? That's not very credible given the bank balances in question.

"I want to widen my fan base: today's four-year-old book consumers are tomorrow's iTunes downloaders"? That carries some weight in the cases of Madonna and Kylie, and Gloria Estefan virtually admits as much by tucking an "exclusive CD single" into the inside front cover. But the most plausible explanation, I think, is this: "I've been making up bedtime stories for my children and suddenly I've had a brainwave. These stories are good! These stories are brilliant! I would be failing in my moral duty to my adoring public if I did not put them down on paper."

If my theory holds true, it is scary, because it suggests that celebrities believe the hype about their own abilities. Worse, it implies a depth of public obsession about the famous that is even more extreme than we realise. It is one thing to want to know which celebrity is sleeping with which, who has fallen out with whom, the stuff and nonsense of tabloid prurience. But to want to listen in to the most intimate bedtime stories told by a celebrity to her or his child, irrespective of their worth, is bordering on the weird.

So what are these books like? Well, if you are looking for the next Beatrix Potter or Maurice Sendak, you will not find it here (Sendak is top of the Times list, but he is looking rather beleaguered). As Anita Silvey, author of 100 Best Books for Children, puts it: "Celebrity books are one of the great negative features of children's publishing in the 21st century. If I were still a publisher, as I used to be, none of these manuscripts would make it past my slush pile."

They are also in large part deeply forgettable. As you reach the end of one of the stories, the beginning has already gone out of mind, thus allowing you to return to the first page and start all over again. This adds a new concept to the lexicon of environmentalism: the endlessly recyclable children's story.

As you read into the books, certain themes and rules of thumb emerge, which could prove useful to anyone seeking to pass themselves off as a celebrity kids' book writer.

Rule one: why use simple names for characters when you can invent fanciful and, frankly, ridiculous ones? The celeb authors probably think they are being Dickensian, but they just come across like Salman Rushdie on one of his flowery days. Madonna stands out in this regard. Meet the English Roses' new teacher, Miss Fluffernutter. If that doesn't convince you of the author's creative prowess, eight pages later we are introduced to Candy Darling (yes, we know, Andy Warhol's chum) and Bunny Love (that's more obscure, but Google does turn up a video of a flesh-and-blood rabbit trying to mate with a cuddly toy). And we'll pass over the four brothers, Timmy, Terry, Taffy and Tricky.

Rule two: make sure you have a moral point to make, and ram it home to your young readers. At risk of sounding like a literary stalker, Madonna leads the pack here yet again. "The next time you start to feel jealous of someone, try to feel happy for them instead. Good things will come your way, too." And: "You can't just love your friends when they are nice to you. That's when it's easy. You have to love them when they are being complete dorks, too."

Rule three: if you can't think of a suitable moral to the story, anything eco will do. Estefan has her animal characters saving the lives of endangered baby sea turtles. Jamie Lee Curtis, whose writing otherwise shines out from the rest of the pack, also succumbs to this weakness. "Make friends and love well," she exhorts us. "Bring art to this place. And make the world better for the whole human race." "You got it!" shouts the four-year-old in reply.

The syndrome of the celeb children's book is in itself not new. Shirley Temple had a series of storybooks in the 1930s, while Elizabeth Taylor wrote Nibbles and Me in her teens about her escapades with a pet squirrel. In the 50s, Broadway star Kay Thompson wrote Eloise, still an American favourite, about a little girl who lives in New York's Plaza hotel and whose mantra is "Getting bored is not allowed".

Over the past 15 years, however, the field has grown more crowded. In Britain, Lenny Henry turned his bedtime stories to his daughter into Charlie, Queen of the Desert. Sting has retold the story of the flood in Rock Steady: a Story of Noah's Ark, in which a hip young couple respond to a newspaper advertisement and take a ride in a boat with a white-bearded old man who has heard God's message on the radio.

With her background, you would have thought that the model Sophie Dahl would have thought twice about strolling into the territory. She certainly lacks her grandfather's wild imagination and deep empathy with a child's view of the world, but she does passably in The Man with Dancing Eyes. But it is Ricky Gervais, whose Flanimals series of books takes rule one above to extreme lengths (try pronouncing Puddloflaj), who has reaped the full rewards of the successful kids' market, spawning websites, Flanimal toys and, soon, an ITV cartoon programme.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the trend has also gathered momentum over the past 10 years. Former president Jimmy Carter had a go with The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, a story about a disabled boy who is befriended by a monster known as, yes, a snoogle-fleejer (Carter was an early exponent of rule one). New York politicians came next, with both the former governor Mario Cuomo and mayor Ed Koch producing volumes. Completing the New York trilogy, it has been reported that the alleged mob boss John "Junior" Gotti has written a children's book, promising the judge at his trial that he planned to make writing for kids an alternative career path to extortion and racketeering. Then there was arguably the most incongruous example of the genre - John Travolta attempting to communicate his love of flying to young children in Propeller One-Way Night Coach. If the title sounds stilted, try reading the text.

There is one other class of celebrity kids' book that really should be mentioned here, which is quintessentially British, but I cannot bring myself to do so: the royal variety. Think Fergie and those helicopters. Think Prince Charles and the Old Man of Lochnagar. Think no more.

But it took the mass appeal of Madonna and English Roses in 2003 to open the flood-gates, and in three years the landscape of children's books - both in Britain and the US - has changed radically. Madonna's publisher in the UK, Francesca Dow, managing director of Puffin, which also handles Kylie and Julie Andrews' books, says that English Roses gave birth to a new truism: if you find a celebrity with a story to tell, and get them to commit to publicising it, substantial sales can be guaranteed.

That financial certainty, clearly desirable to publishers and their famous authors alike, is also good for books, Dow believes, because it cross-subsidises more experimental work. "That's the attraction of the celebrity book: it allows you to launch new talent on the back of others who are more established."

Yes, but ... what about the children? Their parents may be seduced by a famous name on a picturebook cover, but aren't the children the ones to suffer, lumbered as they are with storytelling that ranges from the pretty mediocre to the excruciating?

Joanna Cotler, Jamie Lee Curtis's publisher at HarperCollins for the past 15 years, thinks the paradox is that the children are largely immune to all the hype. For all the millions of copies sold, and money passing hands, they just want a story to believe in. "Kids aged four or five have no concept of celebrity. They don't care if a book is written by Jamie Lee Curtis or anybody else as long as it's good. That's the beautiful irony."

Well, there is only one way to find out what kids think. I tested out Madonna's and Whoopi Goldberg's new books on my six-year-old, Tess. She knows who Madonna is, and - good girl! - thinks that the singer is writing books because she wants to sell more records. Whoopi Goldberg means nothing to her. As for the books themselves, she liked Whoopi's guide to manners "because it was rude", particularly the bit about not opening doors without knocking as there might be a man sitting on the loo on the other side (naughty snigger) and the one about not picking your nose unless you are hiding in a shed. As for Madonna, Tess liked the story and she liked the writing. Her conclusion: "Madonna is a good writer. But she's not a good dancer."

Ouch! In the final analysis, there is no accounting for taste. I am clearly not the target audience for these books, so please discount everything I have just said. Go out and buy those books - your kids will love them.

The best and the worst of today's celebrity kids' books:

Noelle's Treasure Tale by Gloria Estefan

They don't come worse than this. It's hard enough getting beyond the cover, which bills the story as "A new magically mysterious adventure". What kind of grammar is that? It's always a mistake to write in verse if you are incompetent as a writer. And this verse is truly, truly awful. It is a challenge to find the most clunky rhymes, but try this one: "Glaring under some brush like two marbles they shone/ eyes that stared at Noelle like a dog at a bone." That is Estefan's description of a cat.

The Great American Mousical by Julie Andrews

Writing in tandem with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, Andrews makes a pretty reasonable stab at invoking the romance and mystique of Broadway to children aged five to nine. You can hear the clipped diction of Mary Poppins in the narration, which describes a subterranean theatre run by mice that mimics the human one on the stage above. The book is evocative and touching. It is the latest in a successful line of children's books by Andrews, beginning with Mandy in 1971.

Whoopi's Big Book of Manners by Whoopi Goldberg

The good news is that the film star's guide to how to behave manages to avoid being sanctimonious. At times it captures Whoopi's mild eccentricity, with her admonitions to children not to press all the buttons in a lift or her account of the foibles of other cultures. But in other respects it is surprisingly bland. Why does it take Whoopi Goldberg to tell kids that they should not use mobile phones in church or at a restaurant? Are four-year-olds more likely to go to the toilet before taking their seat at the movies because Star Trek's Guinan is telling them?

The English Roses: Too Good to Be True by Madonna

Bloated, vapid, frivolous, silly .. need I go on? OK, I will, with one last observation: the writing is painfully bad. "Dominic de la Guardia was quite a spiffy dancer, but all eyes were on Miss Fluffernutter. She was dancing like a whirling dervish." Spiffy? Spiffy?

Is There Really a Human Race? by Jamie Lee Curtis

Now this is more like it. Lee Curtis has sold 4m copies of her seven children's books, and deserves the success, judging by her latest volume. She came to her publishers, HarperCollins, 15 years ago because she was drawn to an illustrator published by them, Laura Cornell, and the two have been working well together ever since. Words and pictures support each other - a simple concept but depressingly rare in the world of celebrity books. Lee Curtis dares to enter the gladiator's ring of verse, and emerges victorious. "Do some of us win? Do some of us lose?/ Is winning or losing something I choose?/ Why am I racing? What am I winning?/ Does all of my running keep the world spinning?"

High in the Clouds by Paul McCartney

This is the ultimate vegetarian's storybook. It takes us to the fabled land of Animalia, where all animals live in freedom and without fear. To underline McCartney's deep distrust of humanity - and this was written even before the Heather Mills ugliness - he takes us through hideous, tree-less Megatropolis, where animals are used as slave labour. Written with Philip Ardagh, the story has a beginning, middle and end, which is more than some of these books. But it could do with less of the lipservice paid to Disney. EP